Amizade

An evolutionary perspective of friendship selection
Friendships, a fundamental aspect of human social life, can be traced to the ancestral conditions under which humans evolved (Cosmides & Tooby, 1992). Men and women need friends as friendships provide many benefits such as help during difficult times, advice, and access to other friends and potential mates. Men and women select same-sex friends similar to them on a variety of dimensions such as intelligence, physical attractiveness, status, dominance, education, age, and mate value (e.g., Buss, 1984). While same-sex friendships provide adaptive benefits, such friendships may also be destructive. The strong similarity between same-sex friends may cause friends to compete for and steal mates (Buss, 1984; Tolson & Urberg, 1993). By the very nature of their similarity, same-sex friends may be highly compatible with their friends' mates, may have insider information about their friends' relationships with mates, and may be aware of occasions when the relationship is weak (Bleske & Shackelford, 2001).
Opposite sex friendships represent a qualitatively different type of friendship than same-sex friendships. Bleske-Rechek and Buss (2001) suggested that humans possess evolved preferences for opposite-sex friendships that have been adaptive over the course of human evolutionary history. Their in-depth study of the initiation, selection, and dissolution of opposite-sex friendships revealed some similarity with same-sex friendships. For instance, people form opposite-sex friendships to serve needs of companionship. People value friends who are honest, intelligent, and dependable and reject friends who betray, annoy, and lie. However, there are some clear sex differences in opposite-sex friendships that do not exist in same-sex friendships. For example, men, more than women, are motivated by the potential for sex from their opposite-sex friend, report being more sexually attracted to their opposite-sex friend,